First Room of Miseducation

Memoirs of Decay

'Memoirs of Decay' is a digital trilogy documenting a journey of 'The Young Black Man as The Artist', through antipodes of a perceived After Life. Told in Three Chapters, the memoirs are re-visitations of past arbitrary sequences shot by The Filmmakers, and it mainly aims to revise purposes of surrealist activities orchestrated by three video artists. As the ancient sages had inferred that life is a journey without a specific destination, the film is an implicit reconstruction of such a thought and philosophy - which through our contemporary interpretation would be surmised, as “The Journey is the Destination".

This collage aims at creating a transition between ‘The World of the Perpetrator and Victims’, by making fluid the unintentional perceptual intentions of the ‘Image Captor’ and the point of view of ‘The Spectator’ when the images are assembled in a new linear narrative.

Through this narrative experiment the film aims at a distinct analysis of human responses, either to the end of calling most to action or the mere dampening of senses as is experienced by most in our narcissistic societies.

The voyeur in any latent observer of the “Image Captured’, having qualified the individual perspective as valid within the overall scope of collective memory, would therefore be left to make those ethical judgements upon their own shoulders – be they about belief in the authenticity of the depictions.

The Video Remix is comprised mainly of Archive Materials from various sources, and these are compiled in relation to the envisaged edit temperament and the resulting surrealistic montages.

A number of symbols are used to heighten the underpinning Oneiric Element in all the films in the trilogy. And these elements are still left to the viewer as witness to unfolding journey of the ‘Young Black Man as an artist’.

The context of the narrative transpires within a sombre mood of alone-ness, which we believe to be the results of the sequence having being shot when the Artist a recluse due to personal psychological reasons.

First Room of Mis-Education

Through a serene space in a time not determined we find a young man walking the slums of a township that could be anywhere in South Africa. The film thus follows our subject in a somnambulist dream where, with a broken telephone in hand he walks towards graves, crowds of the living until a final meeting with his peers with whom we find no similarity or connection. A ritual of intermittent calls paid to an unknown, a waltz among dancing children and a visit to the kraal; all imply a sombre reality of township life a both symbols and objects of reality. Here the line between reality and surreality is blurred, hoping the viewer will rasp the intricate connections between the two spheres.